Throughout the fall, I ran a daily digital lock dissenter series, pointing to a wide range of organizations representing creators, consumers, businesses, educators, historians, archivists, and librarians who have issued policy statements that are at odds with the government’s approach to digital locks in Bill C-11. While the series took a break over the Parliamentary holiday, it resumes this week with more groups and individuals that have spoken out against restrictive digital lock legislation that fails to strike a fair balance.

New posts will begin tomorrow, but it may be helpful to recount the series to date, which illustrates that no amount of spin can disguise the obvious opposition from groups representing millions of Canadians to the Bill C-11 digital lock provisions:

I fear it probably doesn’t really matter how long the list of organizations that disagree with C11’s digital lock provisions gets… as long as it is on the conservative’s agenda to pass the bill with those provisions intact, it will pass, because the conservatives hold a majority in parliament, and I think that to them, that’s all that ultimately matters. Meanwhile, enough of the people who voted for them are ignorant enough about this whole concept that it probably wouldn’t even significantly affect their chances of reelection.

“Allegations by some that the bill will infringe on the rights of private citizens to transfer something they own from one digital medium to another are vastly overstated.

As others have pointed out, the bill would actually afford greater legal protection to consumers by allowing â€œformat shiftingâ€ and â€œtime shifting.â€”

This is not correct. The presence of digital locks (Which ALL BluRay movies and most DVDs are encumbered with, with both encryption and region coding) trump ALL user rights, including format shifting, time shifting, the ability to make back-ups, personal copies of content you purchase, etc. Kindle books are another example of locked content that would become illegal to convert under C-11, even if you legally purchased it. While mostly, but not entirely gone, DRM protected music would become illegal to convert to any other format. The digital lock rules, like those found the the American DMCA, could have unintended consequences in other sectors, such as the auto and mobile device industries. The digital lock rules is the only serious problem most people I know have with C-11.

All taking action with one’s wallet in the case of protesting C11 after it passes means is voluntarily ostracizing oneself from a highly technological society that is only growing increasingly dependent on digital storage and storage mediums. The only hope that remains, I think, is for the extent of the digital lock provisions to be shown to be either unconstitutional, or otherwise fundamentally incompatible with the concept of copyright… and although definitely not impossible, I don’t think the odds are particularly great on that front either.